Over the last few years there has been a groundswell of demand from businesses, investors, civil society, academics, and intergovernmental institutions to understand better how companies deliver long-term enterprise value and contribute to sustainable development. This trend coincides with growing research by data providers to demonstrate how business impacts society and the planet, and how climate change and societal expectations affect business.
As global data and analytics providers, we help capital markets participants and other stakeholders meet their critical need for information from and about companies. Market participants desire consistent, comparable, and reliable sustainability information that can be used to evaluate long-term value, inform capital allocation and enhance risk management.
We welcome the convergence among global standard-setters that is underway, and we stand ready to make our own contributions to the process. The IFRS Foundation’s proposed Sustainability Standards Board will be a significant and valuable step towards global convergence on sustainability reporting. We would welcome the establishment of a core set of metrics that all companies, regardless of sector, geography, and size, can report on. These could be supplemented by metrics that provide insights into the sustainability issues that are most likely to impact the financial performance of companies within specific sectors, facilitating comparable information among industry peers.
At the invitation of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Measuring Stakeholder Capitalism’ initiative and FCLTGlobal (Focusing Capital on Long-Term), over the past year, our companies have been gathering to share insights on how we may contribute to enhance financial decisions with sustainability data and analytics. We support the use of machine readable, electronic reporting formats that will allow core metrics and associated narrative reporting to be reported and captured in a standardized way. These data formats and processes would allow data to flow from companies to capital markets participants in a decentralized, effective and efficient manner, as global sustainability standards evolve over time.
The issues of how companies deliver long-term value are critical to sustainable development. As global data and analytics providers, our goal is to ensure the consistent flow of information to support the global economy’s transition to a more sustainable path.
Signed:
David Craig, Group Head, Data & Analytics, and CEO Refinitiv, LSEG
Henry Fernandez, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, MSCI
Peter T. Grauer, Chairman, Bloomberg
Douglas L. Peterson, President and Chief Executive Officer, S&P Global
Philip Snow, Chief Executive Officer, FactSet
